Editor Constitution:
The firing of the pistol which took the life of the president of
the United States has shocked the civilized world, and brings prominently
to notice a dastardly weapon which has for more than half a century
been the disgrace of the civil life and jurisprudence of the American
people.
In the days when the American Indians
had no firearms and when bears roved in numbers through the land,
a man might have defended himself with a pistol, which could be
much more conveniently carried than a longer gun. But those days
have passed, never to return. No man can now defend himself with
a pistol. It is almost solely the instrument of the murderer and
assassin. When it kills, it kills the wrong man. The having a pistol
on one’s self is so far from being a defense that it constitutes
a strong presumptive justification of one’s slayer. He who conceals
an engine of death to others on his person thereby makes himself
virtually an outlaw. When the man accused of murder can prove that
his victim was carrying or was accustomed to carry a pistol, he
is never convicted.
The laws against carrying concealed
weapons are almost wholly futile, since there is no adequate provision
for their enforcement. They practically work great injustice by
putting those who obey the law at the mercy of those who disobey
it.
If pistols were abolished so that
no man could have one, then no honorable man would want one. At
least seven-tenths of all murders in this country would be avoided
if pistols were abolished. The right to bear arms does not imply
the right to carry a pistol. The law may prohibit shortness as well
as concealment, and can be enforced only by making the shortest
lawful gun too long to be concealed on one’s person—say, 3 feet
long.
Every American citizen is interested
in this question and owes it to himself and to his country to use
his influence to have this enemy of peace and life driven out of
existence. Surely there is power enough in the states of the union
to abolish utterly and forever a thing which is not needed, which
does so much harm and so little good as the pistol. Even the evils
arising from the accidental discharge of pistols far overbalance
any good they may be supposed to do.